mission bend home foreclosure conference call tonight

[Giselda Rendon]

 

  I'd just thought I'd sent this reminder from Amy's message with a confirmation from people in Atlanta occupying a home that they will be on to help share best practices with us.  My own suggestion is that we let them do that first, to allow them to leave early if we end up talking about more stecific Houston logistics.  

 

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey, y'all! We'll meet via conference call this Thurs at 7PM. Below are links to register

FOR PROMOTION
 http://interoccupy.org/mbfcall/

REGISTER
http://myaccount.maestroconference.com/conference/register/0I1H2ILDSWY3YYCO

This'll be my first time conducting a conference call, so expect a small bit of chaos and please be gentle with me.

Peace,
Amy

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Giselda Rendon <glre...@gmail.com> wrote:

   I met this afternoon with Samuel.  His situation is more complicated than I thought -  his house has already been sold (and now I believed is owned by a place called residential properties LLC).  I know people do defend families "post foreclosure" to remain in their homes - it's really something I know little about personally.  

  As for the family - they had owned the home for 14 years, and, as Amy earlier stated, have gotten a real run around on how to keep it (an initial agent agreed to modify the first loan, then they were given different agents at Fannie Mae who didn't prioritize helping them negotiate at all).  There does seem to be some areas where it's questionable if Fannie Mae did the legal thing - for instance Samuel signed a document instead of his wife, who was the legal owner of the property. 

   He said that somebody from Naca (non-profit who helps with legal aid and refinancing foreclosures) did contact him but after one good conversation he has not been able to get back in touch with them.  I think it should be a high priority for us to get in contact with them as Occupy Houston - I know that was mentioned at Thursday's meeting - and start figuring out legal options very quickly.  Samuel did state a preference for checking out his options legally before the "bolder" pressure options. 

   As for facing eviction -  he did receive a standard notice of eviction from the new property owner but that's different from being served and required by local law enforcement to leave - that requires some proceedings: http://www.jp.hctx.net/evictions/filing.htm  .   (incidentally his property lies half in Fort Bend, half in Harris county).  So we have some time there, as for him facing immediate eviction.  I talked to him about what defending against an eviction might look like - people camped out in his yard (it's a relatively small yard in the corner of two streets), and told him that these kind of campaigns generally involve public awareness (marches on a bank/mortgage holder/property owner, occupations, press conferences/releases, etc.) and he seemed very open to all those ideas, and said he just wanted to fight because the whole situation and foreclosures in general just aren't right.  He seems to have a big family and circle of friends but no immediate church or organization that could help out.  The neighborhood seems probably mostly latino/mixed and working to middle class, so we may have that in our favor. 

   There's also of course the "show me the note", which should def. be explored here because it seems like the property and financial institutions here may have made a mess. 

  As for the Atlanta Occupy folks - also a complicated thing - the "leader" you could say, Tim Franzen, of the actions over there was who I had talked to about being on the call initially but he was arrested yesterday for "littering" at the Chase bank protest they had, so he hasn't gotten back to me about a specific day.  I asked somebody else involved in a home occupation there and she said it shouldn't be a problem to have somebody on, and I will pass them the details when we have our call scheduled. 

 - Giselda

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Amy Price <heig...@gmail.com> wrote:

minutes attached. This includes action items, so please read to remind yourself of what you committed to!

I believe that Giselda, Chris, and I volunteered to take shifts occupying his yard if that seems practical. With the folks who signed up online, we're at 7 people total.

Giselda: Let us know 1) when you expect to have talked to OA, so we can schedule a conference call for next week, and 2) the results of your mtg with our client!

Peace,
Amy

[Emily Butler]

Hi all.

Just wanted to let you know you have the wrong "Emily" attached to your email chain.  I have no idea who any of you are :)

Thanks!

Sent from my iPad

[Amy Price]

Hey, all!

Agenda is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e9IU48CROiGW9MWsSSH944n1nelkm1GwwjDfba5uLeo/edit?hl=en_US

Please add yourself under "Houston reports" if you have info to share.

Peace,
Amy

[Joe Roche]

Nice! Looks good, Amy. I'd love to attend this night but several prior
obligations including a friend's birthday party will prevent me.

Hopefully the folks from Atlanta can help with some very valuable
insight. There is no reason O/H should not be able to make a
significant impact here. Hopefully we're letting the 1% know their
**** really does stank.